Writing enables the transmission of ideas over vast distances of time and space. As civilization has advanced, more and more ideas and records have been memorialized as written documents. Companies, governments and individuals produce documents to supply a written record of their business. Companies, governments and individuals, to comply with certain laws and regulations also produce documents. Under the law, certain documents must be kept for certain specified periods of time, i.e., employee wages and hours worked, health and safety records, shipment and handling of certain hazardous materials, tax records, etc.
Document management programs have been established to provide systematic procedures for the retention, storage, retrieval, destruction and/or protection of documents. Many document management programs archive paper documents by scanning the document and storing the scanned image of the document in an electronic storage database. Since the documents are often stored in databases to save space, the paper document is destroyed after the documents have been scanned.
Thus, a problem of the prior art is that some times paper documents were destroyed by parties who did not want to destroy the documents.
Another problem of the prior art is that parties did not have a record of which documents were saved and which documents were destroyed.